'Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the
'Oh that I were free, then, of myself,' wrote Samuel Rutherford
from Aberdeen in 1637 to John Ferguson of Ochiltree. 'What need we
all have to be ransomed and redeemed from that master-tyrant, that
cruel and lawless lord, ourself! Even when I am most out of myself,
and am best serving Christ, I have a squint eye on myself.' And to the
Laird of Cally in the same year and from the same place: 'Myself is the
master idol we all bow down to. Every man blameth the devil for his
sins, but the house devil of every man that eateth with him and lieth in
his bosom is himself. Oh blessed are they who can deny themselves!'
And to the Irish ministers the year after: 'Except men martyr and slay
the body of sin in sanctified self-denial, they shall never be Christ's.
Oh, if I could but be master of myself, my own mind, my own will, my
own credit, my own love, how blessed were I! But alas! I shall die only
minting and aiming at being a Christian.'
Chapter 8 - OLD MR. PREJUDICE, THE KEEPER OF EAR-GATE, WITH
HIS SIXTY DEAF MEN UNDER HIM
'Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the
waters of Israel?' - Naaman.
'Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?' - Nathanael.
' . . observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing by
partiality.' - Paul.
Old Mr. Prejudice was well known in the wars of Mansoul as an
angry, unhappy, and ill-conditioned old churl. Old Mr. Prejudice was
placed by Diabolus, his master, as keeper of the ward at the post of
Ear-gate, and for that fatal service he had sixty completely deaf men
put under him as his company. Men eminently advantageous for that
fatal service. Eminently advantageous, - inasmuch as it mattered not
one atom to them what was spoken in their ear either by God or by
man.
Now, to begin with, this churlish old man had already earned for
himself a very evil name. For what name could well be more full of evil
memories and of evil omens than just this name of Prejudice? Just
consider what prejudice is. Prejudice, when we stop over it and take it
to pieces and look well at it, - prejudice is so bad and so abominable
that you would not believe it could be so bad till you had looked at it
and at how it acts in your own case. For prejudice gives judgment on
your case and gives orders for your execution before your defence has
been heard, before your witnesses have been called, before your
summons has been served, ay, and even before your indictment has
been drawn out. What a scandal and what an uproar a malfeasance of
justice like that would cause if it were to take place in any of our
courts of law! Only, the thing is impossible; you cannot even imagine
it. We shall have Magna Charta up before us in the course of these
lectures. Well, ever since Magna Charta was extorted from King John,
such a scandal as I have supposed has been impossible either in
England or in Scotland. And that such cases should still be possible in
Russia and in Turkey places those two old despotisms outside the pale
of the civilised world. And yet, loudly as we all denounce the Czar and
the Sultan, eloquently as we boast over Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus,
and what not, every day you and I are doing what would cost an
English king his crown, and an English judge his head. We all do it
every day, and it never enters one mind out of a hundred that we are trampling down truth, and righteousness, and fair-play, and brotherly
love. We do not know what a diabolical wickedness we are
perpetrating every day. The best men among us are guilty of that
iniquity every day, and they never confess it to themselves; no one
ever accuses them of it; and they go down to death and judgment
unsuspicious of the discovery that they will soon make there. You
would not steal a stick or a straw that belonged to me; but you steal
from me every day what all your gold and mine can never redeem; you
murder me every day in my best and my noblest life. You me, and I
you.
Old Mr. Prejudice. Now, there is a golden passage in Jonathan
Edwards's Diary that all old men should lay well to heart and
conscience. 'I observe,' Edwards enters, 'that old men seldom have any
advantage of new discoveries, because these discoveries are beside a
way of thinking they have been long used to. Resolved, therefore, that,
if ever I live to years, I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all
pretended discoveries, and receive them, if rational, how long soever I
have been used to another way of thinking. I am too dogmatical; I have
too much of egotism; my disposition is always to be telling of my
dislike and my scorn.' What a fine, fresh, fruitful, progressive, and
peaceful world we should soon have if all our old and all our fast-
ageing men would enter that extract into their diary! How the young
would then love and honour and lean upon the old; and how all the
fathers would always abide young and full of youthful life like their
children! Then the righteous should flourish like the palm-tree; he
should grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They that be planted in the
house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall
still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing. What
a free scope would then be given to all God's unfolding providences,
and what a warm welcome to all His advancing truths! What sore and
spreading wounds would then be salved, what health and what vigour
would fill all the body political, as well as all the body mystical! May
the Lord turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of
the children to their fathers, lest the earth be smitten with a curse!
Mr. Prejudice was an old man; and this also has been handed
down about him, that he was almost always angry. And if you keep
your eyes open you will soon see how true to the life that feature of old Mr. Prejudice still is. In every conversation, discussion, debate,
correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and,
according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of
his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has
already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so
much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his
understanding for you to think that there is anything to be said in that
matter that he has not long ago heard said and fully answered. Has he
not denounced that bad man and that bad cause for years? You insult
me, sir, by again opening up that matter in my presence. He will have
none of you or of your arguments either. You are as bad yourself as
that bad man is whose advocate you are. We all know men whose
hearts are full of coals of juniper, burning coals of hate and rage, just
by reason of their ferocious prejudices. Hate is too feeble a word for
their gnashing rage against this man and that cause, this movement
and that institution. There is an absolutely murderous light in their
eye as they work themselves up against the men and the things they
hate. Charity rejoices not in iniquity; but you will see otherwise
Christian and charitable men so jockeyed by the devil that they
actually rejoice in iniquity and do not know what they are doing, or
who it is that is egging them on to do it. You will see otherwise and at
other times good men so full of the rage and madness of prejudice and
partiality that they will storm at every report of goodness and truth
and prosperity in the man, or in the cause, or in the church, or in the
party, they are so demented against. Jockey is not the word. There is
the last triumph of pure devilry in the way that the prince of the devils
turns old Prejudice's very best things - his love of his fathers, his love
of the past, his love of order, his love of loyalty, his love of the old
paths, and his very truest and best religion itself - into so much fat fuel
for the fires of hate and rage that are consuming his proud heart to
red-hot ashes. If the light that is in us be darkness, how great is that
darkness; and if the life that is in us be death, how deadly is that
death!
Old, angry, and ill-conditioned. Ill-conditioned is an old-fashioned
word almost gone out of date. But, all the same, it is a very expressive,
and to us to-night a quite indispensable word. An ill-conditioned man
is a man of an in-bred, cherished, and confirmed ill-nature. His heart, which was a sufficiently bad heart to begin with, is now so exercised
in evil and so accustomed to evil, that, - how can he be born again
when he is so old and so ill-natured? All the qualities, all the passions,
all the emotions of his heart are out of joint; their bent is bad; they run
out naturally to mischief. Now, what could possibly be more ill-
conditioned than to judge and sentence, denounce and execute a man
before you have heard his case? What could be more ill-conditioned
than positively to be afraid lest you should be led to forgive, and
redress, and love, and act with another man? To be determined not to
hear one word that you can help in his defence, in his favour, and in
his praise? Could a human heart be in a worse state on this side hell
itself than that? Nay, that is hell itself in your evil heart already. Let
prejudice and partiality have their full scope among the wicked
passions of your ill-conditioned heart, and lo! the kingdom of
darkness is already within you. Not, lo, here! or, lo, there! but within
you. Look to yourselves, says John to us all, full as we all are of our
own ill-conditions. Look to yourselves. But we have no eyes left with
which to see ourselves; we look so much at the faults and the blames
of our neighbour. 'Publius goes to church sometimes, and reads the
Scriptures; but he knows not what he reads or prays, his head is so full
of politics. He is so angry at kings and ministers of state that he has no
time nor disposition to call himself to account. He has the history of all
parliaments, elections, prosecutions, and impeachments by heart, and
he dies with little or no religion, through a constant fear of Popery.'
Poor, old, ill-conditioned Publius!
And, then, his sixty deaf men under old, angry, ill-conditioned
Prejudice. We read of engines of sixty-horse power. And here is a man
with the power of resisting and shutting out the truth equal to that of
sixty men like himself. We all know such men; we would as soon think
of speaking to those iron pillars about a change of mind as we would
to them. If you preach to their prejudices and their prepossessions
and their partialities, they are all ears to hear you, and all tongues to
trumpet your praise. But do not expect them to sit still with ordinary
decency under what they are so prejudiced against; do not expect
them to read a book or buy a passing paper on the other side. Sixty
deaf men hold their ears; sixty ill-conditioned men hold their hearts.
Habit with them is all the test of truth; it must be right, they've done it from their youth. And thus they go on to the end of their term of life,
full of their own fixed ideas, with their eyes full of beams and
jaundices and darkness and death. Some people think that we take up
too much of our time with newspapers in our day, and that, if things
go on as they are going, we shall soon have neither time nor taste for
anything else but half a dozen papers a day. But all that depends on
the conditions with which we read. If we would read as Jonathan
Edwards read the weekly newsletters of his day; if we read all our
papers to see if the kingdom of God was coming in reply to our prayer;
if we read, observing all things, like Timothy, without prejudice or
partiality, then I know no better reading for an ill-conditioned heart
begun to look to itself than just a good, out-and-out party newspaper.
And if it is a church paper all the better for your purpose. If you read
with your fingers in your ears; if you read with a beam in your eye,
you had better confine yourself in your reading; if you feel that your
prejudices are inflamed and your partiality is intensified, then take
care what paper you take in. But if you read all you read for the love of
the truth, for justice, for fair-play, and for brotherly love, and all that in
yourself; if you read all the time with your eyes on your own ill-
conditioned heart, then, as James says, count it all joy when you fall
into divers temptations. Take up your political and ecclesiastical paper
every morning, saying to yourself, Go to, O my heart, and get thy daily
lesson. Go to, and enter thy cleansing and refining furnace. Go to, and
come well out of thy daily temptation. - A nobler school you will not
find anywhere for a prejudiced, partial, angry, and ill-conditioned
heart than just the party journals of the day. For the abating of
prejudice; for seeing the odiousness of partiality, and for putting on
every day a fair, open, catholic, Christian mind, commend me to the
public life and the public journals of our living day. And it is not that
this man may be up and that man down; this cause victorious and that
cause defeated; this truth vindicated and that untruth defeated, that
public life rolls on and that its revolutions are reported to us. Our own
minds and our own hearts are the final cause, the ultimate drift, and
the far-off end and aim of it all. We are not made for party and for the
partialities and prosperities of party; party and all its passions and all
its successes and all its defeats are made, and are permitted to be
made for us; for our opportunity of purging ourselves free of all our illconditions, of all our prejudices, of all our partialities, and of all the
sin and misery that come to us of all these things.
'It is the work of a philosopher,' says Addison in one of his best
Spectators, 'to be every day subduing his passions and laying aside his
prejudices.' We are not philosophers, but we shall be enrolled in the
foremost ranks of philosophy if we imitate such philosophers in their
daily work, as we must do and shall do. Well, are we begun to do it?
Are we engaged in that work of theirs and ours every day? Is God our
witness and our judge that we are? Are we so engaged upon that
inward work, and so succeeding in it, that we can read our most
prejudiced newspaper with the same mind and spirit, with the same
profit and progress, with which we read our Bible? A good man, a
humble man, a man acutely sensible of his ill-conditions, will look on
every day as lost or won according as he has lost or won in this inward
war. If his partialities are dropping off his mind; if his prejudices are
melting; if he can read books and papers with pleasure and
instruction that once filled him with dark passions and angry
outbursts; if his Calvinism lets him read Thomas A Kempis and Jeremy
Taylor and William Law; if his High-Churchism lets him delight to
worship God in an Independent or a Presbyterian church; if his Free-
Churchism permits him to see the Establishment reviving, and his
State-Churchism admits that the Free Churches have more to say to
him than he had at one time thought; if his Toryism lets him take in a
Radical paper, and his Radicalism a Unionist paper - then let him
thank God, for God is in all that though he knew it not. And when he
counts up his incalculable benefits at each return of the Lord's table,
let him count up as not the least of them an open mind and a well-
conditioned heart, an unprejudiced mind, and an impartial heart.
And now, to conclude: Take old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice,
his daily prayer: 'My Adorable God and Creator! Thy Holy Church is by
the wickedness of men divided into various communions, all hating,
condemning, and endeavouring to destroy one another. I made none
of these divisions, nor am I any longer a defender of them. I wish
everything removed out of every communion that hinders the
Common Unity. The wranglings and disputings of whole churches and
nations have so confounded all things that I have no ability to make a
true and just judgment of the matters between them. If I knew that any one of these communions was alone acceptable to Thee, I would
do or suffer anything to make myself a member of it. For, my Good
God, I desire nothing so much as to know and to love Thee, and to
worship Thee in the most acceptable manner. And as I humbly
presume that Thou wouldst not suffer Thy Church to be thus
universally divided, if no divided portion could offer any worship
acceptable unto Thee; and as I have no knowledge of what is
absolutely best in these divided parts, nor any ability to put an end to
them; so I fully trust in Thy goodness, that Thou wilt not suffer these
divisions to separate me from Thy mercy in Christ Jesus; and that, if
there be any better ways of serving Thee than those I already enjoy,
Thou wilt, according to Thine infinite mercy, lead me into them, O God
of my peace and my love.' After this manner old, angry, ill-conditioned
Prejudice prayed every day till he died, a little child, in charity with all